Thursday, 17 January 2013

Hackers backdoor the human brain, successfully extract sensitive data

With a
chilling hint of the not-so-distant future, researchers at the Usenix
Security conference have demonstrated a zero-day vulnerability in your brain. Using a commercial
off-the-shelf brain-computer interface, the researchers have shown that it’s
possible to hack your brain, forcing you to reveal information that you’d
rather keep secret.

As we’ve
covered in the past, a brain-computer
interface is a two-part device: There’s the hardware — which is usually a
headset (an EEG; an electroencephalograph) with sensors that rest on your scalp
— and software, which processes your brain activity and tries to work out what
you’re trying to do (turn left, double click, open box, etc.)

BCIs are
generally used in a medical setting with very expensive equipment, but in the
last few years cheaper, commercial offerings have emerged. For $200-300, you
can buy an Emotiv (pictured above) or Neurosky BCI, go through a short training
process, and begin mind controlling your computer.

Both of these
commercial BCIs have an API — an interface that allows developers to use the
BCI’s output in their own programs. In this case, the security researchers —
from the Universities of Oxford and Geneva, and the University of California,
Berkeley — created
a custom program that was specially designed with the sole purpose of
finding out sensitive data, such as the location of your home, your debit card
PIN, which bank you use, and your date of birth. The researchers tried out
their program on 28 participants (who were cooperative and didn’t know that
they were being brain-hacked), and in general the experiments had a 10 to 40%
chance of success of obtaining useful information (pictured above).

To
extract this information, the researchers rely on what’s known as the P300
response — a very specific brainwave pattern (pictured right) that occurs when
you recognize something that is meaningful (a person’s face), or when you
recognize something that fits your current task (a hammer in the shed). The
researchers basically designed a program that flashes up pictures of maps,
banks, and card PINs, and makes a note every time your brain experiences a
P300. Afterwards, it’s easy to pore through the data and work out — with fairly
good accuracy — where a person banks, where they live, and so on.

In
a real-world scenario, the researchers foresee a game that is specially tailored
by hackers to extract sensitive information from your brain — or perhaps an
attack vector that also uses social engineering to lull you into a false sense
of security. It’s harder to extract data from someone who knows they’re being
attacked — as interrogators and torturers well know.

Moving
forward, this brain hack can only improve in efficacy as BCIs become cheaper,
more accurate, and thus more extensively used. Really, your only defense is to
not think about the topic — but if you’re proactively on the defensive, then
the hacker has already messed up. The only viable solution that I can think of
is to ensure that you don’t use your brain-computer interface with shady
software, brain malware — but
then again, in a science-fictional future, isn’t it almost guaranteed that the
government would mandate the inclusion of brain-hacking software in the
operating system itself?

An Israeli
student has become the first person to meld his mind and movements with a robot
surrogate, or avatar.
Situated inside an fMRI scanner in Israel, Tirosh Shapira has controlled a
humanoid robot some 2000 kilometers (1250 miles) away, at the Béziers
Technology Institute in France, using just his mind.

The fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging) reads his thoughts, a computer
translates those thoughts into commands, and then those commands are sent
across the internet to the robot in France. The system requires training: On
its own, an fMRI can simply see the real-time blood flow in your brain
(pictured below right). Training teaches the system that a particular “thought”
(blood flow pattern) equates to a certain command. In this case, when Shapira
thinks about moving forward or backward, the robot moves forward or backward;
when Shapira thinks about moving one of his hands, the robot surrogate turns in
that direction.

To
complete the loop, the robot has a camera on its head, with the image being
displayed in front of Shapira. Speaking to New
Scientist, it sounds like Shapira really became one with the robot: “It was
mind-blowing. I really felt like I was there, moving around,” he says. “At one
point the connection failed. One of the researchers picked the robot up to see
what the problem was and I was like, ‘Oi, put me down!’”

This isn’t
particularly surprising, though: We humans are very, very good at integrating
other objects into our mental model of ourselves (the rubber hand trick; video
below), or filling other vessels with our persona (role-playing games, digital
avatars in virtual worlds).

This
area of research — robot surrogates — is of particular interest for two
reasons: a) The military would
love to send robots into battle, rather than soldiers, and b) Paralyzed,
locked-in, and vegetative people could use robots to interact with the world,
effectively replacing their damaged body with a shiny new robot. In recent
years, lots of research has shown that many of these people still have
perfectly functional brains — it’s just a matter of connecting them up to a
working physical body.

Both the
militaristic and medicinal applications will require a lot more research,
though. In this case, an fMRI scanner (a huge and expensive piece of equipment)
is used because it’s more accurate than an EEG
— but moving forward, improved software might allow the use of an EEG, or
perhaps head-mounted
fNIRS (functional near-infrared spectroscopy) could be used. On the robotics
side of the equation, a lot of work is being done to create robots are
remarkably human-like, such as Boston
Dynamics’ Petman, Kawada Industries’ HRP-4, and Meka
Robotics’ anime head (videos embedded below).

Who knows, in
a few years, you might be able to slip a brain-computer interface over your
head (or perhaps your Google
Glass will have a built-in BCI?), lean back, and control a robot avatar
that could be anywhere in the world — or galaxy. With enough sensory feedback
(if something touches the robot, you should feel it too), you could travel the
world every night after work — or, my personal favorite, engage in robot vs.
robot deathmatches.

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